Partial information decomposition as a unified approach to the specification of neural goal functions

In many neural systems anatomical motifs are present repeatedly, but despite their structural similarity they can serve very different tasks. A prime example for such a motif is the canonical microcircuit of six-layered neo-cortex, which is repeated across cortical areas, and is involved in a number of different tasks (e.g. sensory, cognitive, or motor tasks). This observation has spawned interest in finding a common underlying principle, a ‘goal function’, of information processing implemented in this structure. By definition such a goal function, if universal, cannot be cast in processing-domain specific language (e.g. ‘edge filtering’, ‘working memory’). Thus, to formulate such a principle, we have to use a domain-independent framework. Information theory offers such a framework. However, while the classical framework of information theory focuses on the relation between one input and one output (Shannon’s mutual information), we argue that neural information processing crucially depends on the combination of multiple inputs to create the output of a processor. To account for this, we use a very recent extension of Shannon Information theory, called partial information decomposition (PID). PID allows to quantify the information that several inputs provide individually (unique information), redundantly (shared information) or only jointly (synergistic information) about the output. First, we review the framework of PID. Then we apply it to reevaluate and analyze several earlier proposals of information theoretic neural goal functions (predictive coding, infomax and coherent infomax, efficient coding). We find that PID allows to compare these goal functions in a common framework, and also provides a versatile approach to design new goal functions from first principles. Building on this, we design and analyze a novel goal function, called ‘coding with synergy’, which builds on combining external input and prior knowledge in a synergistic manner. We suggest that this novel goal function may be highly useful in neural information processing

Implications of Information Theory for Computational Modeling of Schizophrenia

Information theory provides a formal framework within which information processing and its disorders can be described. However, information theory has rarely been applied to modeling aspects of the cognitive neuroscience of schizophrenia. The goal of this article is to highlight the benefits of an approach based on information theory, including its recent extensions, for understanding several disrupted neural goal functions as well as related cognitive and symptomatic phenomena in schizophrenia. We begin by demonstrating that foundational concepts from information theory—such as Shannon information, entropy, data compression, block coding, and strategies to increase the signal-to-noise ratio—can be used to provide novel understandings of cognitive impairments in schizophrenia and metrics to evaluate their integrity. We then describe more recent developments in information theory, including the concepts of infomax, coherent infomax, and coding with synergy, to demonstrate how these can be used to develop computational models of schizophrenia-related failures in the tuning of sensory neurons, gain control, perceptual organization, thought organization, selective attention, context processing, predictive coding, and cognitive control. Throughout, we demonstrate how disordered mechanisms may explain both perceptual/cognitive changes and symptom emergence in schizophrenia. Finally, we demonstrate that there is consistency between some information-theoretic concepts and recent discoveries in neurobiology, especially involving the existence of distinct sites for the accumulation of driving input and contextual information prior to their interaction. This convergence can be used to guide future theory, experiment, and treatment development

No evidence for an effect of testosterone administration on delay discounting in male university students

SummaryIntertemporal choices between a smaller sooner and a larger delayed reward are one of the most important types of decisions humans face in their everyday life. The degree to which individuals discount delayed rewards correlates with impulsiveness. Steep delay discounting has been associated with negative outcomes over a wide range of behaviors such as addiction. However, little is known about the biological foundations of delay discounting. Here, we examine a potential causal link between delay discounting and testosterone, a hormone which has been associated with other types of impulsive behavior. In our double-blind placebo-controlled study 91 healthy young men either received a topical gel containing 50mg of testosterone (N=46) or a placebo (N=45) before participating in a delay discounting task with real incentives. Our main finding is that a single dose administration of testosterone did not lead to significant differences in discount rates between the placebo and the testosterone group. Within groups and in the pooled sample, no significant relationship between testosterone and discount rates was observed. At the same time, we do replicate standard findings from the delay discounting literature such as a magnitude-of-rewards effect on discount rates. In sum, our findings suggest that circulating testosterone does not have a significant effect on delay discounting in young men

The challenges of containing SARS-CoV-2 via test-trace-and-isolate

Without a cure, vaccine, or proven long-term immunity against SARS-CoV-2, test-trace-and-isolate (TTI) strategies present a promising tool to contain the viral spread. For any TTI strategy, however, a major challenge arises from pre- and asymptomatic transmission as well as TTI-avoiders, which contribute to hidden, unnoticed infection chains. In our semi-analytical model, we identified two distinct tipping points between controlled and uncontrolled spreading: one, at which the behavior-driven reproduction number of the hidden infections becomes too large to be compensated by the available TTI capabilities, and one at which the number of new infections starts to exceed the tracing capacity, causing a self-accelerating spread. We investigated how these tipping points depend on realistic limitations like limited cooperativity, missing contacts, and imperfect isolation, finding that TTI is likely not sufficient to contain the natural spread of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, complementary measures like reduced physical contacts and improved hygiene probably remain necessary

Cortical oscillatory activity is critical for working memory as revealed by deficits in early-onset schizophrenia

Impairments in working memory (WM) are a core cognitive deficit in schizophrenia. Neurophysiological models suggest that deficits during WM maintenance in schizophrenia may be explained by abnormalities in the GABAergic system, which will lead to deficits in high-frequency oscillations. However, it is not yet clear which of the three WM phases (encoding, maintenance, retrieval) are affected by dysfunctional oscillatory activity. We investigated the relationship between impairments in oscillatory activity in a broad frequency range (3–100 Hz) and WM load in the different phases of WM in 14 patients with early-onset schizophrenia and 14 matched control participants using a delayed matching to sample paradigm. During encoding, successful memorization was predicted by evoked theta, alpha, and beta oscillatory activity in controls. Patients showed severe reductions in the evoked activity in these frequency bands. During early WM maintenance, patients showed a comparable WM load-dependent increase in induced alpha and gamma activity to controls. In contrast, during the later maintenance phase, patients showed a shift in the peak of induced gamma activity to the lower WM load conditions. Finally, induced theta and gamma activity were reduced in patients during retrieval. Our findings suggest that the WM deficit in schizophrenia is associated with impaired oscillatory activity during all phases of the task and that the cortical storage system reaches its capacity limit at lower loads. Inability to maintain oscillatory activity in specific frequency bands could thus result in the information overload that may underlie both cognitive deficits and psychopathological symptoms of schizophrenia

Ketamine Dysregulates the Amplitude and Connectivity of High-Frequency Oscillations in Cortical-Subcortical Networks in Humans: Evidence From Resting-State Magnetoencephalography-Recordings

Hypofunctioning of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor (NMDA-R) has been prominently implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia (ScZ). The current study tested the effects of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic and NMDA-R antagonist, on resting-state activity recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) in healthy volunteers. In a single-blind cross-over design, each participant (n = 12) received, on two different sessions, a subanesthetic dose of S-ketamine (0.006 mg/Kg) and saline injection. MEG-data were analyzed at sensorand source- level in the beta (13-30 Hz) and gamma (30-90 Hz) frequency ranges. In addition, connectivity analysis at source-level was performed using transfer entropy (TE). Ketamine increased gamma-power while beta-band activity was decreased. Specifically, elevated 30-90 Hz activity was pronounced in subcortical (thalamus and hippocampus) and cortical (frontal and temporal cortex) regions, whilst reductions in beta-band power were localized to the precuneus, cerebellum, anterior cingulate, temporal and visual cortex. TE analysis demonstrated increased information transfer in a thalamo-cortical network after ketamine administration. The findings are consistent with the pronounced dysregulation of highfrequency oscillations following the inhibition of NMDA-R in animal models of ScZ as well as with evidence from EEG-data in ScZ-patients and increased functional connectivity during early illness stages. Moreover, our data highlight the potential contribution of thalamo-cortical connectivity patterns towards ketamine-induced neuronal dysregulation, which may be relevant for the understanding of schizophrenia as a disorder of disinhibition of neural circuits

Mixtures of independent component analyzers for EEG prediction

This paper presents a new application of independent component analysis mixture modeling (ICAMM) for prediction of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Demonstrations in prediction of missing EEG data in a working memory task using classic methods and an ICAMM-based algorithm are included. The performance of the methods is measured by using four error indicators: signal-to-interference (SIR) ratio, Kullback-Leibler divergence, correlation at lag zero and mean structural similarity index. The results show that the ICAMM-based algorithm outperforms the classical spherical splines method which is commonly used in EEG signal processing. Hence, the potential of using mixtures of independent component analyzers (ICAs) to improve prediction, as opposed on estimating only one ICA is demonstrated.This work has been supported by Generalitat Valenciana under grants PROMETEO/2010/040 and ISIC/2012/006Safont Armero, G.; Salazar Afanador, A.; Vergara Domínguez, L.; Gonzalez, A.; Vidal Maciá, AM. (2012). Mixtures of independent component analyzers for EEG prediction. En Green and smart technology with sensor applications. Springer Verlag (Germany). 338:328-335. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35251-5_46S328335338Common, P., Jutten, C.: Handbook of Blind Source Separation: Independent Component Analysis and Applications. Academic Press, USA (2010)Salazar, A., Vergara, L., Serrano, A., Igual, J.: A general procedure for learning mixtures of independent component analyzers. Pattern Recognition 43(1), 69–85 (2010)Lee, T.W., Lewicki, M.S., Sejnowski, T.J.: ICA mixture models for unsupervised classification of non-gaussian classes and automatic context switching in blind signal separation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 22(10), 1078–1089 (2000)Salazar, A., Vergara, L.: ICA mixtures applied to ultrasonic nondestructive classification of archaeological ceramics. Eurasip Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2010, article ID 125201, 11 pages (2010), doi:10.1155/2010/125201Klein, C., Feige, B.: An independent component analysis (ICA) approach to the study of developmental differences in the saccadic contingent negative variation. Biological Psychology 70, 105–114 (2005)Makeig, S., Westerfield, M., Jung, T.P., Covington, J., Townsend, J., Sejnowski, T.J., Courchesne, E.: Functionally Independent Components of the Late Positive Event-Related Potential during Visual Spatial Attention. Journal of Neuroscience 19(7), 2665–2680 (1999)Wibral, M., Turi, G., Linden, D.E.J., Kaiser, J., Bledowski, C.: Decomposition of working memory-related scalp ERPs: Crossvalidation of fMRI-constrained source analysis and ICA. Internt J. of Psychol. 67, 200–211 (2008)Castellanos, N.P., Makarov, V.A.: Recovering EEG brain signals: Artifact suppression with wavelet enhanced independent component analysis. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 158, 300–312 (2006)Salazar, A., Vergara, L., Miralles, R.: On including sequential dependence in ICA mixture models. Signal Processing 90, 2314–2318 (2010)Dayan, P., Abbot, L.F.: Theoretical neuroscience: computational and mathematical modeling of neural systems. The MIT Press (2001)Sternberg, S.: High-speed scanning in human memory. Science 153(3736), 652–654 (1966)Raghavachari, S., Lisman, J.E., Tully, M., Madsen, J.R., Bromfield, E.B., Kahana, M.J.: Theta oscillations in human cortex during a working-memory task: evidence for local generators. J. of Neurophys. 95, 1630–1638 (2006)Gorriz, J.M., Puntonet, C.G., Salmeron, G., Lang, E.W.: Time series prediction using ICA algorithms. In: Proc. of 2nd IEEE Internat. W. on Intellig Data Acquisition and Advanc. Comp. Systems: Tech. and App., pp. 226–230 (2003)Lin, C.-T., Cheng, W.-C., Liang, S.-F.: An On-line ICA-Mixture-Model-Based Self-Constructing Fuzzy Neural Network. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers 52(1), 207–221 (2005)Lee, T.W., Girolami, M., Sejnowski, T.J.: Independent component analysis using an extended InfoMax algorithm for mixed sub-gaussian and super-gaussian sources. Neural Computation 11(2), 417–441 (1999)Perrin, F., Pernier, J., Bertrand, D., Echallier, J.F.: Spherical splines for scalp potential and current density matching. Electroencep. and Clin. Neurophys. 72, 184–187 (1989)Wang, Z., Bovik, A., Sheikh, H., Simoncelli, E.: Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 13(4), 600–612 (2004

A framework for the local information dynamics of distributed computation in complex systems

The nature of distributed computation has often been described in terms of the component operations of universal computation: information storage, transfer and modification. We review the first complete framework that quantifies each of these individual information dynamics on a local scale within a system, and describes the manner in which they interact to create non-trivial computation where "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". We describe the application of the framework to cellular automata, a simple yet powerful model of distributed computation. This is an important application, because the framework is the first to provide quantitative evidence for several important conjectures about distributed computation in cellular automata: that blinkers embody information storage, particles are information transfer agents, and particle collisions are information modification events. The framework is also shown to contrast the computations conducted by several well-known cellular automata, highlighting the importance of information coherence in complex computation. The results reviewed here provide important quantitative insights into the fundamental nature of distributed computation and the dynamics of complex systems, as well as impetus for the framework to be applied to the analysis and design of other systems.Comment: 44 pages, 8 figure

The Timing of Feedback to Early Visual Cortex in the Perception of Long-Range Apparent Motion

When 2 visual stimuli are presented one after another in different locations, they are often perceived as one, but moving object. Feedback from area human motion complex hMT/V5+ to V1 has been hypothesized to play an important role in this illusory perception of motion. We measured event-related responses to illusory motion stimuli of varying apparent motion (AM) content and retinal location using Electroencephalography. Detectable cortical stimulus processing started around 60-ms poststimulus in area V1. This component was insensitive to AM content and sequential stimulus presentation. Sensitivity to AM content was observed starting around 90 ms post the second stimulus of a sequence and most likely originated in area hMT/V5+. This AM sensitive response was insensitive to retinal stimulus position. The stimulus sequence related response started to be sensitive to retinal stimulus position at a longer latency of 110 ms. We interpret our findings as evidence for feedback from area hMT/V5+ or a related motion processing area to early visual cortices (V1, V2, V3)